More and more mobile android powered devices enter the market, but the number of netbooks and bigger devices running the android operating system out of the box is still very small. Google itself seems to put more energy in the development of Chrome OS than on porting the droid to the x86 platform. But there is hope! The guys over at android-x86.org are working hard on exactly that task.

Everyone who tried to get Android on his netbook knows it: it is a very cumbersome task. First you have to download all the sources from Googles Git tree, then you have to get your development system ready to compile Android and after entering "make" you can go and get a coffee (or sometimes even breakfast, lunch and dinner) before you can harvest the fruits of your work. If you have to adapt the kernel for another target platform than the machine that you're compiling the sources on: it gets even more complicated.

But thanks to the guys at android-x86.org this is getting easier quickly. They created installer images for USB and CD where you can choose if you only want to test Android (live image mode) or if you want to install it. And they are working on a Android 2.0 version, I believe.

This review is about that product and how easy it is to get it working on all kind of machines.

These are screenshots from the installing process. You can find more in the screenshot section.

My test set consisted of the following machines:

• IBM Thinkpad A22m
• a one year old MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel CPU
• seven year old Vaio SR11k

IBM Thinkpad A22m

The A22m is several years old and of course not the most powerful machine anymore. It has a CD ROM built in and to make it more netbook look alike I replaced the original hard disk with a 8 GB compact flash card and attached it with a IDE to Compact Flash Adapter to the laptop. After burning the ISO image (which you can find in download section) I started Android in live mode. I had to choose the VESA mode, which adds a vga=788 to the kernel params. Then it worked: after two or three minutes android came up and I could even connect to the internet using the A22m's ethernet connector. So a quite simple task. Then I tried to install it to the CF card and that was fairly easy as well: just choose the install option in the GRUB menu and you're on your way: tell the installer how to format your disk, add some other options and your done.

MacBook Pro, Intel 2.4GHz

Just out of curiosity I had to try to run the live CD on my MacBook Pro. And to my big surprise it worked! It took Android a little bit more than a minute to come up. I played a little with the moon lander game, started the web browser and checked Androidx86.org;-).

Sony Vaio SR11K

This machine was somewhat of a hassle: this device is several years old and it can't boot from a pen drive. It doesn't have a CD drive integrated but comes with a external drive that is attached through a PCMCIA card. When I tried to run the installer from CD, GRUB menu would show up but then it would complain about not finding certain files. I decided to do it a little bit different: I installed Android first on a CF card using the thinkpad I was talking about earlier. After the install was finished, I took out the CF card and the IDE2CF card adapter and put everything in the VAIO. To my big surprise it worked from the beginning (after adding vga=788 to the kernel command).

Getting the Wifi to work

So, I had the Vaio booting into Linux but since I want to use this tiny device to become my new kitchen PC I needed it to have WLAN working as well. I tried two PCMCIA cards which didn't work and a Linksys WUSB54GC USB Adapter. Android linux seemed to recognize but dmesg showed a problem loading the rt73.bin firmware file required by the USB dongle. So I downloaded the latest Linux driver from the Ralink website and unzipped the tarball. The firmware file needs to go to /system/lib/firmware. Since the system partition is mounted read only I took out the CF card again, put it into a CF card reader and mounted the system on my linux machine. There I mounted the system.sfs image. It contains a system.img file, which I copied to another place and mounted it as well. Then I was able to copy the rt73.bin file to the lib/firmware directory.

Now I needed to recreate the squashfs read only image. First I had to install the squash tools with

apt-get install squashfs-tools

and then

to regenerate the read only version of the system partition. I unmounted all images and restarted the VAIO with the CF card. And to my big surprise it worked!

TIP: add BUSYBOX=1 to your kernel parameters to have a somewhat decent linux environment after switching to the command line.

Speed

I tried different operating systems for the Vaio to get my kitchen PC running. While very small distributions like puppy linux or DSL or extremely fast I wanted to have a better user interface to use it with a touch screen. Android boots very fast even on this old machine: in about 50 seconds it is ready and if you send it to sleep mode, it's back again in less than 10 seconds. Android also immediately recognized the USB touch screen module, although I don't know yet how to calibrate it.

Conclusions

The Android 1.6 installer for x86 is already surprisingly stable and seems to run well on a variety of hardware without big problems. The test with the old VAIO SR11K, which is an early ancestor of todays netbooks was pushing Android to its limits (and my patience too, sometimes) but it turned out well. So, if you have a device you want to try running Android: don't hesitate. Try with the live image and if you like, what you see, install it. Thanks to the great work of the guys at android-x86.org!